Accurate time stamp on files?

[David Snider]

Ok, does anybody know of a simple way of determining the difference in time stamps of creation, modification and accesses on two files including seconds? Tried ls, but it only shows hour and minute differences.. I need to know down to the second information.. I know this information must be available because right clicking on the file from a SAMBA share shows the hour, minute and second of modification, access time and creation time.. But I can't seem to find a way to have a shell script do a right click from my desktop on the file in the share, grab a screen print, OCR the image and dump the text to a file on the unix box.. :-) Thanks in advance..

David..

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

Have a look at superls, available here: http://gatekeep.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Shells/sls-1.0/

This should do what you need to do.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi David:

I have a perl script that I've used for quite a while.

ftimes.pl

ftimes.pl [-m | -a | -c ] [-e] file1 ...

For each file it will print the datestamp of mtime (default) or -a atime or -c ctime. The -e arg causes the output to be in epoch seconds rather than the standard date format.
If more than 1 filename is supplied, the filename is printed followed by the datestamp otherwise simply the datestamp.

Enjoy, Clay

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi David:

Here's a somewhat obtuse way:

# shar -m ./myfile > ./myfile.shar
# grep touch ./myfile.shar

...you will see the modification and access timestamps this way at the hour/minute/second level.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Frank Slootweg]

If you want/must use standard commands and just the modification time will do:

echo /path/file | cpio -o 2>/dev/null | cpio -ivt 2>/dev/null

It is only slightly less obtuse than James' method! :-)

[Wodisch]

Hello,

why not write a small C program to "stat(2)"
that file and use the data you get?

Just my ?0.02,
Wodisch

[David Snider]

Thanks all for your replies.. Of course the simple click here and download this file c/o patrick was my favorite, I did try the others, James, for some reason, that shar -m alwasy shows the seconds as 01, no matter how often I change the file.. And sorry Frank, I couldn't get yours to work at all.. Echo /path/file would do just that, just echo the text '/path/file' to the screen..

Thanks again for all of your replies.. ;-)

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again) David:

My apologies! I could have sworn that I was correct. It turns out that the "01" you see is the YY (year). If you look at the 'touch' man pages, you will see that the syntax used in the 'shar' file is the deprecated form of 'touch' where the timestamp is expressed as 'MMDDhhmm[YY]' instead of '[[CC]YY]MMDDhhmm[.SS]'.

Regards!

...JRF...